Location: Maputo, Mozambique Day 1,223 Miles on the clock: 32,810 The no man’s land between the Burundian and Tanzanian border posts was 15 miles of hilly mud tracks passing several UNHCR refugee camps built to house people escaping the violence over the nearby Congolese border. Emaciated men ferried back and forth with heavy bicycle loads of plantain, maize flour or water.

As with Kenyans, Ugandans speak good English almost without exception. So, the policemen at their station that I asked to camp next to welcomed me, brought a bucket of water, insisted I “sluice away” my “heavy grime”, and warned me of the baboons. The screaming of these pests woke me from the tree branches over my tent and I rode onward in the cool morning, reaching Jinja just as the afternoon heat was peaking. I pitched up at busy campsite with a lawn overlooking the adolescent stretch of the White Nile shortly after it spills out of Lake Victoria. The waters idling downstream here are the same ones that I drank copiously and straight from the murky, silty river in Sudan to quench my thirst in the desert heat months ago.

Three years (almost to the day) after setting off on my bicycle, I finally crossed into the southern hemisphere. I'd been up to the Arctic and within 85 miles of the equator in Singapore, so it felt like a landmark and I took the appropriate posed photos infront of the sign.

The leaky dugout canoe deposited me and my bicycle on the western bank of the chocolate-brown Omo River. As the gnarled, old log was piloted away, I found myself in the large, wild no mans land straddling Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya. Mounting my rusty old bike, I set out to trace the gaping Rift Valley along the shore of Lake Turkana and southwards to Nairobi.

Location: Nairobi, Kenya Day 1,113 Miles on the clock: 29,010 Ethiopia immediately differed from conservative, neighbouring Sudan. Metema, the border town, was a strip of bars, pool halls, women in tight-fitting clothes, loud African music on tinny speakers, barber shops with paintings of proudly-sported afros, and even a topless white woman painted on a shop front.